Boys basketball: Kevin Glynn gets it going

PEQUANNOCK — When Kevin Glynn gets hot, his Pequannock teammates make every effort to get him the ball as much as possible.

Glynn delivered when they did that Monday night. The junior forward scored nine of his 11 points in the fourth quarter to help the eighth-seeded Panthers fend off ninth-seeded Lakeland, 51-43, in the first round of the North 1, Group 2 boys basketball tournament.

Pequannock trailed, 38-34, entering the fourth quarter after Lakeland closed the third on an 8-0 run. But Glynn scored Pequannock’s first nine points of the fourth, including a layup that gave the Panthers the lead for good, 43-41, in a back-and-forth game that included seven lead changes and six ties.

"If we didn’t have him down there," senior center Kurt Weinmann said of Glynn, "we probably wouldn’t have won."

Weinmann was a significant factor, too.

Matched against Petko Ljusic, Lakeland’s 6-foot-8 junior center, the 6-4 Weinmann scored a team-high 17 points, grabbed 10 rebounds and blocked three shots. He scored four points in Pequannock’s game-closing 12-2 run, and despite struggling at times this season from the foul line, connected on all five of his free throws in the game.

"Kurt played excellent," Pequannock coach Jeff DeBell said. "I was really pleased with how he stepped up [Monday night]. He’s 6-8, a big kid in there. [Weinmann] was physical with him and did a great job."

Ljusic finished with eight points and 12 rebounds for the Lancers, who were denied what would’ve been their first boys basketball state tournament win since 1989. Senior forward Ian Rhode scored 14 of his team-high 16 points in the first half for Lakeland (14-11) and pulled down six rebounds.

In addition to what Weinmann and Glynn produced up front, Pequannock (15-11) received good guard play.

"Our guys, right now, they don’t want it to end," DeBell said. "We’ve been on a pretty good run. We started off 2-5 way back in the beginning of the year. They want to keep playing, so we weren’t going to stop in the fourth quarter. We were just playing hard. But Lakeland is an excellent team, so to get a win against them, I’m very, very happy for our guys."

Pequannock will play at top-seeded Westwood, which defeated 16th-seeded Lenape Valley on Monday night, in the quarterfinals Wednesday.

"We’ve lost to some mediocre teams because we haven’t played well," LaPorta said. "But then in the [Morris] County tournament, we hung with teams that were three, four, five seeds. We took Hanover Park, which was the No. 4 seed, into overtime. We were right there so many times and [Monday night] we actually finished it off. Hopefully we can continue that."